?1255 My Body
Ryu's eyes snapped open.
He found himself sitting in a pool of lava. The lava had an odd cooling effect that definitely wasn't normal, but what he did realize was that he wasn't standing at the moment. When had he begun sitting? Could it be that he had been here the entire time?
Ryu looked around.
The pool of lava was quite small and contained by cultivation standards. It was, likewise, surrounded by nine pillars that seemed to be dripping with dense golden liquid and that fell into the pool. It was clear that the power of this lava pool was being sustained by these pillars.
After a while, Ryu seemed to understand. He had likely been plopped into this pool the moment he crossed the threshold. Everything else had been an illusion. The rise of the nine pillars likely coincided with the dripping liquid from these pillars.
'My body...'
Ryu suddenly realized that he had crossed several levels of the Blood Tempering Realm, shocking him greatly. This wasn't because the change was that groundbreaking. After all, the Blood Tempering Realm was only the equivalent of the Dao Pedestal and Cosmic Seed Realms, for a Ninth Heaven inheritance, this sort of gap was negligible.
What really shocked Ryu was how thoroughly it had done so and how he hadn't even been aware of what was happening.
The Blood Tempering Realm was a bit more complex compared to the Vessel Tempering and Pulse Tempering Realms. It was separated into Red Blood, Rose-Bronze Blood, Rose-Silver, Rose-Gold, and finally Origin Blood which turned you blood a slight shade of royal blue.
Ryu had experienced some of these temperings before, but after his rebirth he had fallen back to the Vessel Tempering Realm. Of anyone in existence, Ryu had probably recultivated these realms more than anyone else, so he was quite intimately familiar with it all.
'No, that's what it is... I didn't undergo just the Blood Tempering Realm, I underwent my first Life Destruction? What is just the first? How many did I experience?'
Ryu couldn't put his finger on it. Something had changed about his body, and because he didn't have a proper reference for how powerful this baptizing was, nor just how much his body had changed while his mind was absent, he found it difficult to pin it all down.
'Could it be that I underwent all nine Life Destructions?'
It was no wonder such a thing would be so difficult to accept. The Nine Life Revolutions Realm was the pinnacle mortal realm of the Body Realm, for all intents and purposes, it was the World Sea Realm equivalent. Most weren't even guaranteed to reach one Life Destruction, let alone all nine of them. Of course, while Ryu had always planned to undergo all nine, he too acknowledged how difficult this would be, which was why it was hard to believe that he would have experienced such a difficult thing in his sleep.
Only Ryu would describe it as such. For most, it was brutal torture, how could the realm his mind had been trapped in be considered "sleep". Many would have never made their way out.
Ryu looked down at his body, his gaze flickering several times.
"Little woman, what happened to me?"
Ryu had no choice but to ask the Favor Alchemy Sky God although he didn't expect an answer. To his surprise, this little woman actually answered.
"... You underwent the Nine Pillar Flame Tempering."
"What is that? How is it different from Nine Life Destruction?"
"It is very different. Like I said before, the word Taboo used to only refer to the powers themselves, but there was a reason the word was chosen. It also described breaking the mold. The Unbalance Art Sect was a Sect of Formation Masters, they broke the mold in formations and their creations.
"The Nine Pillar Flame Sect was a Body Realm power. Their Nine Pillar Flame Tempering refers to recultivating the Body Realm nine times. The reason you feel that you are both in the Blood Tempering Realm and the Nine Life Revolutions Realms at the same time is because of this.
"It's actually nothing more than an illusion. Your blood right now is probably much more gold than it is blue, and that's a time that you've recultivated the Pulse, Vessel and Blooding Tempering Realms over again, nine times over.
"You are currently in the Pinnacle of the Blood Tempering Realm, but it isn't any less powerful than if you had completed the Nine Life Revolutions Realms.
"While this is excellent, it will also make your Life Destructions countless times more difficult. Your First Destruction will feel like the 10th. Your Second Destruction will feel like the 19th. Your Third will feel like the 28th. If by some miracle you complete all Nine Destructions, it will feel like you had completed 82."
Ryu's pupils constricted.
He hadn't expected such a thing, but now that he had heard her explanation, he felt that she was very much correct. He was still trying to analyze things through a lens of his normal comprehension of cultivation, but without his knowledge, he had already been thrust into a completely different one.
The irony wasn't lost on him. He had just been thinking about how he wouldn't casually divert his path if it affected his future, only to find out that he had been thrust on such a path without even his knowledge.
While this sounded great, and his Body Realm would likely be exceptionally powerful from now on even given the weakness of his Bloodlines, he now had no choice but to separate his Realms now when he entered the Sky God Realm.
While he had planned on doing this anyway, the issue was that now one path was already set to match that of the Taboo Powers and he didn't know how this would affect other things.
Ryu knew that he didn't have much of a choice, so he shifted his mentality and began looking through his body with this new perspective.
The moment he did, the things he found left his pupils constricting once more.
'My Bone Structure? Bloodlines? What happened to them...?"
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